Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Crisis looms at the Pentagon
By Chalmers Johnson
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the United States
automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it
receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is
undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are
already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer
electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools,
textiles and much earth-moving equipment - and that's to name only the most
obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging
economies that were
able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service and fuel
economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the
military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the deceitful
practices that have long characterized the high command of the armed forces,
civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists
looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or
even bribes for votes.
Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on
the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal
constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax
revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that
leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We
face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of
being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system
in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly
designed weapons.
Double crisis at the Pentagon
This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong
weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility
surrounding the armed forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms
industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.
Recently, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to
advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense
spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value
of goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean
simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for
national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in
the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to
deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which
has gone on for decades.
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by
ideology, delusion and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe
that our military is the largest, best equipped and most invincible among the
world's armed forces. None of these things are true, but our military is,
without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans
account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than
the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking is the fact that the military seems increasingly ill-adapted
to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most
likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan
- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense (DoD)
produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels
of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships and futuristic weapons systems
that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors
mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live
matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the
stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the
weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that
are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the
battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners".
The air force and the army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near
future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the
Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the navy, with its 11 large
aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S Lind has written, "still
structured to fight the Imperial Japanese navy".
Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies
carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the navy's
aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a
century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still
cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance … Submarines are today's and
tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of
blue waters."
In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in
the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent
evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of
the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least 20 years,
patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a
self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death
spiral."
As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced
equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one
for one basis". There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness",
a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the
priorities", and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the
current crisis.
Failed reform efforts
There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long
characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas
Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior
official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon
veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the
weapons acquisition system.
These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman
Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission,
the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989
Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense
Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force
and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance
Responsibility initiative of the air force, and the Capabilities-Based
Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this
century.
Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major
defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than
planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He
also added the following observations:
Launching into major
developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of
major cost and schedule problems ... Costs, schedules, and technical risks are
often grossly understated at the outset ... There are more acquisition programs
being pursued than DoD can possibly afford in the long term ...
By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred
in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation,
are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out
that the emperor has no clothes, the US military will continue to hemorrhage
taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short
of meeting the needs of troops in the field.
The inevitable day
of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally
arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become
accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs
and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their re-election
campaigns.
Given the present major recession, the depths of which remain unknown, the
United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class
aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George
HW Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can
cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles - 2.176 kilometers - per hour).
However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven
one thing over the past decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of
reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD
and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their
in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any,
competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning
and executing its budget and acquisition programs."
Gunning for the air force
President Barack Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M Gates as
secretary of defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries
to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to
the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22
"Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet
Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The air force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back
aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired secretary of the air force Michael W
Wynne and air force chief of staff General T Michael Moseley. Though he was
undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover
explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting
and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the air force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone
fuses for Minutemen inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) warheads
instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully
undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six
armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot air
force base in North Dakota to Barksdale air force base in Louisiana. This was
in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United
States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008,
"Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly
over Gates' frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the air force
to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly
not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics,
went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would
be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with
China".
It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that,
despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve - or
the political backing - to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to
bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically
complicated successor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the
now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that
Congress would appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted
weapons systems and then prevent their cancelation when the fraud comes to
light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games", of which his superiors
deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock
in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering".
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the
military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use
defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors
who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is
also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political
engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve
criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so
that it cannot be turned off. They are de arguer practices of our
military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project
based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This
happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably
involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order.
Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be
simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect
of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of
bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to
be a grossly expensive lemon.)
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many
different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and
Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political
engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs
even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in
the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually
prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often
unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts
and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are
needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in
service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber,
which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the
complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to
reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is
because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may
increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be
almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates
without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense;
it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully
adequate to perform; and - at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21
bombers - it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam
aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog".
It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the US Air Force. Its
task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of
obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably
with the air force's hot-shot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the
first Gulf War in 1991. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers.
The A-10 is now out of production because the air force establishment favors
extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather
than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the air force has
regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part
because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately
high-performance equipment.
Using the F-22 to fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming
the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a
particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is canceled.
Threats are also made - and put into effect - to withhold political
contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build
a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime
contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified
showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were
at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not
canceled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing
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